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Mac users pay attention, OSX builds switching to 64-bit

Submitted by Nir on Mon, 03/12/2012 - 00:33

Tonight's build of SoulseekQt for Mac is the first public version of SoulseekQt that's built as a 64-bit executable. Up until recently, I've been using a version of OSX tweaked for use with an AMD processor inside of a virtual machine. The difficulties this created were many. It was not stable, it was very slow, but worst of all it did not support 64-bit programs, and consequently could not run the newest version of Qt Creator. Instead, I had to settle for an older 32-bit version that linked against older versions of the Qt library and could never be updated. It worked fine, but I became worried that one day I would need these newer Qt libraries. I was finally able to replace my AMD motherboard and CPU with Intel counterparts about a month ago. This seemed like nothing but good news for the Mac version of SoulseekQt, as not only could I now actually boot my PC as a full-fledged 64-bit Hackintosh, but also run OSX in 64-bit mode inside a virtual machine. Soon after though, I discovered that the newer, 64-bit version of Qt Creator which I could finally use, had the unfortunate, apparently unintended limitation of only being able to compile 64-bit applications.

The good news is that I can finally keep up with the latest updates to Qt as I put out new builds. The bad news, I hope, is limited to the fact that small but important parts of the code have changed fundamentally to accommodate this new architecture, and may create new bugs in places that didn't have them before. Those I will address to the best of my ability as crash reports are posted to the forum. The part I am not clear on is whether having SoulseekQt released as a 64-bit application will have any meaningful impact on its ability to run on various different Mac hardware platforms. This is something only you, the Mac user, can tell me. If the 64-bit issue does become a significant problem, I will keep looking into ways of getting Qt Creator to build 32-bit versions again. I've read in a couple of places that the problem lies in the fact that only the 64-bit versions of the Qt library are installed with Qt Creator, and that it can be overcome by compiling a 32-bit version of the library yourself, but I did just that and the situation did not change. There's also the hope that this will eventually be fixed in Qt Creator as I've heard others complain about it around the web. Until then, keep me posted.

Hey there I don't think my MBP running SL can load 64 bit apps, it's the following spec, all I get when I open the DMG is "You can't open the application SoulSeekQT because it is not supported on this mac"